Soft Matter

Explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition within Russian culture of salutary weakness.

“ Soft Matter seems all too necessary in a world newly divided and threatened by aggressive populism, military invasions, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality. Vaingurt’s study of “weakness” makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations about Soviet culture after Stalin, the challenges of late modernity, the need to reconsider gender categories, and the ethical and political potentials of solidarity based on human vulnerability.” —Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto

"Julia Vaingurt’s Soft Matter brilliantly elucidates a set of attitudes within late Soviet culture that opposed the dominant discourse of heroism and masculinity by embracing “weakness” as a desirable human condition. Not only is this a rich study in the intersection of literary and philosophical ideas, it is especially apt in an era when a Russian regime has once again resorted to masking its own weakness behind grotesque and exaggerated claims of masculinity."—Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, Dornsife

Julia Vaingurt is a professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her previous books include Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s , also published by Northwestern University Press.